More memshrink news, or how awesome is Firefox 15?

Memshrink lead Nicholas Nethercote posted another excellent update yesterday on memshrink progress in general and in particular on how Firefox 15 ( coming soon to the beta channel! ) is nothing short of sea-change in add-on memory usage:

TL;DR Firefox 15 prevents most memory leaks caused by add-ons, including Firebug. For many users with add-ons installed this will significantly reduce Firefox’s memory consumption, without requiring upgrades to those add-ons.

As Joe Biden might say, this is a big effing deal, and I am really looking forward to Firefox 15 being released in 6 short weeks! Although Nicholas’ post is long it is a great read if you are at all interested in these changes, and even if you aren’t it is worth skipping to the bottom where he shares some anecdotal feedback from users.

Another similar improvement coming down the pipe ( as early as Firefox 17! ) is the new ‘nukeSandbox’ technique implemented by the SDK & Platform teams to ensure that JavaScript sandboxes created by add-ons are cleaned up correctly – this work was tracked in bugs 769273 ( “CCW “Nuke” feature for sandboxes” ) and 775067 ( “Start using Cu.nukeSandbox” ).

While we do not expect the same dramatic level of improvement in memory usage as will be introduced by the changes in Firefox 15, when dealing with add-ons and memory leaks, even incremental improvements can yield real benefits for Firefox users. This particularly affects SDK-based add-ons as we make heavy use of sandboxes to enforce our security model.

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This amazing milestone was made possible by the hundreds of millions of Firefox users and more than 25,000 Firefox Add-ons developers around the globe. To thank you, we wanted to share the below infographic for a snapshot of Firefox Add-ons statistics and milestones.